01/12/11 by Trevor Oldak | Blog, Development Blog | 3 Comments »
Cellit Studio is the most robust mobile couponing, mobile marketing, and interactive text messaging platform in the world. As an engineer at Cellit, one of my primary tasks is to add new features and capabilities to Cellit Studio and its underlying platform. Here are a few of the many features that we have added to Cellit Studio over the past six months.
Real-Time Charting
Now, when you launch a mobile campaign, you can see real-time data and statistics on what your users are texting in, and what they’re receiving back as responses. This data is updated as it happens. Try it for yourself! Log in to Studio, click ‘Review’, and then ‘Keyword Activity’, and then text in one of your keywords. The chart should update almost instantaneously.
What’s even cooler: Click on any day on the chart. You’ll be able to drill down to see hour-by-hour activity. All of this information is exportable to XLS, CSV, or PDF.
Mapping
When someone texts in, we can gather some basic information about them from just their phone number, such as the state from which their area code originates. Now, in Cellit Studio, you can see a map of where people are texting in from, or where the most people are redeeming mobile coupons. Are the majority of your participants from Massachusetts? Arizona? What kind of text-message marketing and mobile advertising are you doing in your most successful areas?
What’s even cooler: Click on any state in the map to zoom in and see what area codes within the state are yielding the best results.
AND/OR Rule Groupings in the Campaign Launcher
Let’s say you want to message people who were sent your last message, or people who texted one of your keywords in the past three days. Most text messaging platforms, if they can do either of those, can’t do both at the same time, and you’d have to set up two campaigns. And then you would have to worry about people who could be in both campaigns and receive the message twice. Now, Cellit Studio lets you create complex campaign recipient rules with speed and ease, so you can better target your campaigns in the most effective way possible. This saves you time and energy and increases the effectiveness of your mobile marketing campaign.
Target by Time Zone or State
Another new feature of the campaign launcher is that you can now send a message to people with area codes in a specific state. That way, your ice cream discounts can go to those in Texas, while your Alaskan subscribers receive the hot chocolate coupon. Or, you can have a campaign that goes out at 8AM AST to those in the Bahamas, 8AM HST to those in Hawaii, and 8AM in the respective time zones of everyone in between.
In-line expiration dates
Now, you can create coupons that expire at a time relative to when the subscriber receives the message. That way, someone who receives a coupon on December 6th can have it expire on the 13th, while someone who receives it on the 12th may have until the 19th. This is especially powerful when incorporated with our coupon redemption software, Widgit.
12/27/10 by Scott Dolan | Blog, Development Blog | 1 Comment »
Since it’s the end of the year, we decided to share some text traffic stats from Cellit. While none of this is earth shattering, it gives a general idea of what cell phone providers account for usage. As you can see, Verizon and AT&T are the big boys on the block. Combined, these two providers account for over 60% of incoming text messages to Cellit, followed by T-Mobile and Sprint, respectively. US Cellular and Boost Mobile were the only other carriers to show up with an overall percentage over 1%. Worthy to note is that Verizon’s figures include Alltel numbers which they purchased in 2009.
Month to month, the percentage of traffic from AT&T and Verizon is growing while traffic from Sprint seemed to be holding steady. T-Mobile and US Cellular are trending slightly downward over the course of the past year.
Month to month, Verizon and AT&T texting traffic percentages are almost in parallel with AT&T traffic increasing towards the end of the year. AT&T may have the lowest customer satisfaction according to Consumer Reports, but perhaps the demise of AT&T is a bit overblown. We’ll have to check back on these figures next spring to see if Consumer Reports is right (or if the rumored Verizon iPhone is released, that ought to shake things up a bit!).
12/01/09 by Trevor Oldak | Blog, Development Blog | No Comments »
Mobile phones used to be just that… a phone that wasn’t tethered to a land-line. Early models came with a duotone screen, an alarm clock, and a four-function calculator. Text messages were unheard of, and the only mp3 players on the market were no-name brands and the first-generation iPod. Drive space was limited to little more than the capacity of the SIM card.
Lately, with improvements in miniaturization enabling us to hit the lower limit of comfortable cell phone size, electronics makers have been trying to cram every technology imaginable into the devices they sell. Today’s smart phones come with a multitouch-screen with millions of colors, camera, mp3 player, GPS, compass, accelerometers, 4GB (or higher) hard drive, and of course, microphones, speakers, internet, and text messaging.
Augmented Realty. For Rent apartment-finding Augmented Reality App written with Layar.
Similarly to how the six simple machines were considered the building blocks of early inventors, builders, and engineers, these phone capabilities have become the basic components of every popular phone application available in mobile stores. Google maps combines the GPS and internet capabilities to provide directions and location information. Shazam uses a microphone, mp3 capabilities, and internet access to identify and locate music. Thousands of other apps use every capability of the phone to meet practically every need available. Applications that don’t combine at least two of the capabilities of the phone are either novelty or incomplete.
One of the most impressive combinations of available technology has been augmented reality applications. Augmented reality, or AR for short, supplies you with additional data as you observe the environment around you. The concept for augmented reality has been around for decades. The head-up display has assisted military and commercial pilots for decades. And now, phones are capable of mimicking this behavior for the average person.
So, what’s needed for augmented reality? Well, for starters, a camera. The camera can see what you see, and provide an image to represent “reality” and augment with additional information. Unless you’re in a very limited environment, you’ll need internet access to pull down information about what you’re looking at. With its narrow angle of view, you need a compass to tell the application what direction you’re facing, and the accelerometers to provide information about vertical viewing angle. The GPS relays location information and pinpoints the location of points of interest. The combination of these technologies allows for a wealth of possible applications.
Despite the diverse mastery of technologies required to make an AR application, two prominent projects have already popped up in iPhone and Android stores. Yelp is credited with writing the first AR iPhone application, providing information about local businesses. Layar soon followed, with a free, open framework for searching for and creating your own AR applications. I took this opportunity to develop an apartment-finding application for For Rent Media Solutions (see picture above). It was easy, fun, and a great learning experience.
There’s some debate on how large this market will grow and what it will mean for businesses. As a pure technology guy, I appreciate the potential that it offers – and have confidence that the sales guys will find opportunities for the technology to provide value to brands.
So what’s next for mobile phones? What other technologies can we cram in there? An RFID reader? Infrared? Improvements in existing technology could bring us in some interesting directions… A better camera could read barcodes, and GPS improvements can provide better detail on your surroundings. Perhaps soon we’ll be able to create a 3-d model of our environment using our phone’s camera and GPS, just by holding up our phone as we walk through it.
We live in interesting, exciting times.
04/14/09 by David Wachs | Blog, Development Blog | 1 Comment »
We often use our blog to write posts on industry trends and general forces affecting the mobile landscape. However, sometimes we fail to talk about the obvious: how we, Cellit, are changing our industry.
Cellit is currently rolling out a number of new products: iPhone apps, Android apps, more text messaging platforms, and even one “super secret” system we’ll be announcing later in the year that revolutionizes the mobile couponing industry. For now, however, I’d like to discuss one of our most useful, most practical, and best-kept secrets: the Widgit.
Simply put, the Widgit allows businesses, small and large, to loop mobile marketing into their business processes. It quickly and easily integrates mobile marketing within the the store or restaurant’s point of sale (POS) system, enabling our clients to track coupon redemption and prevent over-redemption. It’s simple, it’s effective, and it installs in about 2 minutes on any Windows-based POS system. 
Cellit is all about working with our clients to develop solutions that work. Recently, many of our QSR clients expressed the need for a version of the software that doesn’t require a keyboard. Now, the Widgit works with touchscreens too!
The user literally draws a “mobile coupon” button on their POS system, using our tool. When the user taps this new button with their finger, the Widgit appears. Everybody at Cellit, and each of our clients using the system love it.
Of course, the Widgit ties directly in with our CouponZap and CellitStudio campaign management systems, so all coupon redemptions are tracked in real-time. To learn more, please give us a call and we’d be happy to arrange a demo.
